Owners of two of Chicago's most successful food shops had wanted no part in business ownership.

"The last thing I thought I'd be doing is what I'm doing now," said Hot Doug's hot dog shop owner Doug Sohn, among culinary entrepreneurs on the authors panel, "Let's Eat: Hot Doug's, Hoosier Mama and Chicago Diner," at the Harold Washington Library Center on Wednesday. "I was hoping it would last six months."

It has been been more than 13 years now, and Sohn is co-author of "Hot Doug's: The Book." Chef and television personality Anthony Bourdain deemed Hot Doug's one of the "13 Places to Eat Before You Die," published in Men’s Health magazine. It was the only Chicago establishment on Bourdain's global list.

Paula Haney, who founded Hoosier Mama Pie Co. and co-authored "The Hoosier Mama Book of Pie: Recipes, Techniques, and Wisdom from the Hoosier Mama Pie Company," also wanted no part of restaurant ownership. She was pastry chef at Trio in Evanston, where molecular gastronomist Grant Achatz (Alinea,Next) started his career and where she had to follow his creations.

"It was a lot of fun," Haney said during the discussion moderated by WBEZ’s Peter Sagal. "But it was kind of stressful because we would have these wonderful tasting meetings, and Grant would do something insanely brilliant. Then everyone would look at me, and I knew what I made had to follow whatever he just did. That was six days a week, 16 hours a day. I usually spent my day off brainstorming or testing stuff. I was really tired, and I just wanted a piece of pie, because that's what I grew up making and that’s what I grew up eating."

"A lot of people didn’t know what a real piece of pie tasted like," she said. "I felt like it was my responsibility to save pie."

She opened a storefront in West Town, a 650-square-foot shop that she took on because she could get a lease for only a year, and the rent was low enough that if the business flopped, she could continue to pay rent without going bankrupt.

Kat Barry, business development specialist at The Chicago Diner, was in real estate eight years ago when she became a vegan after finding herself stuck in a bathroom - sick from eating cheese.

"I missed winning this big award," she said. "I said never again was I going to be in the bathroom when everyone else gets the glory."

Barry is the coauthor of a book in honor of the diner’s 30th anniversary: "The New Chicago Diner Cookbook: Meat-Free Recipes from America's Veggie Diner."

That's the famed vegetarian diner that serves up reubens and wings, of all things.

"The philosophy is definitely to present American comfort foods to people like yourself," she told Sagal. "Most of our customers are not vegetarians. Sixty-five percent are not vegetarians. We want to present this food as light and fun."

With her pie company, Haney wants to present a regional appeal.

"One of the reasons I put 'Hoosier' in the name of our company was that nobody took Midwestern food seriously," she said. "When I started working at Trio, the best compliment people could think to give us was 'Oh, I thought I was in New York' or 'Oh, I thought I was in L.A.' What do you say to that?"

Barry called Chicago "a city where people want to get behind you. We support each other. What are you going to do besides eat when it's negative 20?"